Hunting The Muse

Gay Marriage Redux

For all the intelligence and scholarly thought on the left, there's a lot of chickenshitism.

I've twice brought up my thoughts regarding gay marriage in online progressive discussion forums, and both times gotten serious resistance from people.

Now, I'm okay with getting resistance to my ideas if I feel like they are being fully accepted and then responded against with some other information that I haven't thought of.

But far too often, the kind of responses that a big idea gets are the kind that only half-swallow the suggestion, and then ward the rest of it off with a wall.

My main point regarding gay marriage is that while arguing in favor of it, referring to it in terms of "protection of our right to marry" is a bunch of garbage.

What I advocate is a more head-on defense of gay marriage. That gays haven't been able to marry each other, and that they deserve to be able to marry each other. That allowing gays to marry is an expansion of rights as far as society is concerned. It is a new step forward in societal tolerance, and needs to be acknowledged and dealt with in a head-on manner.

What I dislike are the so-called "framing" techniques that try to convince heterosexuals that if they don't vote yes on gay marriage, that their ability to marry is somehow degraded. That if they want to protect the institution of marriage, they have to vote yes. That if we don't allow gays to marry, then we have less freedom to marry than we used to. (It's surprising how many people try to pass that one off.) It's ridiculous.

We are not going to get far at all by trying to appeal to Joe Heterosexual's self-interest. This is not about the self-interest of straight people. It's about recognizing that gays should have the right to marry.

Some folks tried to make the point that of course it's about "freedom to marry", just like how allowing women to vote was about "freedom to vote", and how allowing blacks to vote was about "freedom to vote", and so doesn't that mean that I would be against arguing for the freedom to vote on behalf of women and blacks?

That's exactly what I mean in terms of being so scared of dealing with it head on that they will wriggle around and try to not even see my point. No, of course that representation of my point is not correct. My point is that when women were given the right to vote, the debate was specifically about allowing WOMEN to vote. It wasn't about convincing MEN that their right to vote would somehow be threatened. Same with black civil rights.

There is a lot of worrying and shame about homosexuality among the left. That's what I mean about chickenshitism. The main argument in favor of allowing blacks to vote was hardly, "It's not his fault that he's black. He can't help it that he's black. He didn't make the decision to be black. We can't hold it against him that he's black. So we should let him vote like everyone else!" I mean, honestly. That's repugnant. Too many people on the left are trying to find any way possible to not talk about homosexuality. They hear a point about advocating a more head-on defense, get scared that there won't be oxygen about it, and instead of getting busy to create the oxygen, they come up with tortured academic explanations about why the truth won't fly. This debate is about bigotry, and it's bigotry that needs to be dealt with head-on. Until we get over our shame and embarrassment about our dirty gay siblings in the back closet, we'll be fighting a losing battle.

Posted by Curt at January 4, 2005 06:17 PM